Obama’s Foreign-Policy “Failures”: A Word for the Defense

President Obama has lost the foreign-policy commentariat—and I’m not just talking about the usualconservativebashers. In today’s Washington Post, David Ignatius writes, “Under Obama, the United States has suffered some real reputational damage. I say that as someone who sympathizes with many of Obama’s foreign policy goals.”

Echoing Ignatius’s point, the cover of The Economist this week asks “What Would America Fight For?” and suggests this is “the question haunting its allies.” In the Financial Times earlier this week, Ed Luce wrote, “The US is behaving like a declining hegemon: unwilling to share power, yet unable to impose outcomes.” Even the New York Times, in an editorial saying that critics have gone too far, noted, “Too often, Mr. Obama’s ambitions seem in question. It does not feel as if he is exercising sufficient American leadership and power, even if he is in fact working to solve a problem.”

The immediate issue is the West’s failure to prevent Vladimir Putin from destabilizing eastern Ukraine, but the concerns about Obama run deeper and broader than that. He stands accused of prematurely pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan; encouraging the Arab Spring protests but doing nothing to prevent authoritarian regimes from reasserting control; issuing “red lines” and ignoring when they are crossed; failing to clinch a trade deal with Japan; and, well, you get the idea. Underlying the individual charges is an argument that the President neither cares for nor understands foreign policy, and that he is largely content to react to events overseas based on domestic political considerations. “At key turning points—in Egypt and Libya during the Arab Spring, in Syria, in Ukraine and, yes, in Benghazi—the administration was driven by messaging priorities rather than sound, interests-based policy,” Ignatius writes.

It all adds up to quite an indictment. In assessing its merits, let’s set aside the Benghazi tragedy, which reflected a failure of State Department security arrangements, but which did not, as far we know, directly involve the President or then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The rest of the charges share a common theme: Obama lacks a coherent foreign-policy strategy—an “Obama doctrine”—and, because of this, he tends to behave opportunistically and inconsistently.

Is that really the case? It would be equally accurate to say that Obama, for the most part, has been following a consistent strategy—but one that many foreign-policy experts don’t like, because it militates against American interventionism. This strategy, which some would call “realism,” is based on cold-hearted self-interest. It’s equally skeptical of far-flung military entanglements and high-minded liberal nostrums. It’s a way of looking at the world that dates back to Machiavelli, and one which, at this moment in history, happens to have the overwhelming support of the American public.

If you examine what Obama has done rather than what he has said, most of it fits the realist rubric. (As Fred Kaplan observed in Politico Magazine in February, where he, too, described the President as a realist, “Perhaps more than any president since Dwight Eisenhower, Obama defines the national interest narrowly and acts accordingly.”) Obama hastened the removal of U.S. troops from Iraq, arguing that the war didn’t warrant the expenditure of any more U.S. lives or tax dollars. When some people suggested that the United States, having made a terrible mess of things, had a moral duty to help clean it up, he went ahead and withdrew all the U.S. forces anyway. In Afghanistan, a similar calculus played out. After criticizing George W. Bush for concentrating on the wrong war during the 2008 election, Obama agreed to the Pentagon’s request for a military surge, but he quickly decided it was a largely a futile effort. In his memoir, Bob Gates, the former Secretary of Defense, noted, “For him, it’s all about getting out.”

And not getting in to begin with. The war in Vietnam taught the United States that military force is a very blunt instrument, and that exercising it casually can backfire horribly. For some reason, the neoconservatives and the liberal interventionists both eventually forgot this lesson—but Obama, having risen to the Presidency largely on the back of his hostility to the war in Iraq, never did. Where declared enemies of the United States can be located and targeted, such as in Yemen and in the tribal areas of Pakistan, he hasn’t hesitated to use U.S. drones to attack them. Elsewhere, though, he has acted with caution.

About the only time Obama overcame his skepticism about overt military action was during the Libyan uprising, and even then he sought the cover of the United Nations and restricted U.S. involvement to air power. In making his “red line” remark about Syria, he conveyed an unequivocal message he didn’t really mean to send: if Bashar al-Assad’s regime resorted to chemical weapons, the United States would attack it. The U-turn that eventually ensued was something of a shambles, but it was perfectly consistent with the realist approach. The United States got Assad to agree to give up the chemical-weapons stockpiles that threatened Israel, and almost ninety per cent of them have now been turned over to international monitors. The Syrian dictator got the green light to carry on crushing the rebels, and their supporters, using conventional weapons.

In dealing with Russia and Ukraine, Obama is being criticized for not imposing tougher economic sanctions and for not sending more NATO troops to places like Latvia and Estonia, which fear that the Kremlin’s meddling might spread to their borders. If we let Putin ride roughshod over Ukraine, Obama’s critics say, we will set a terrible precedent for future military incursions. That may be true. But the realist response is that Ukraine, like Georgia, which Putin’s armed forces attacked in 2008, has always been part of Russia’s sphere of influence, and that the only practical response is a graduated economic one that steadily increases the pressure on the Russian leader and his cronies. At this stage, it is too early to say whether this strategy will work. It’s not clear, though, what alternatives were available.

To be sure, Obama has contributed to his own problems. When he was running for office, and even after he took over, he said things that made it easy to mistake him for a liberal interventionist. In a 2007 article for Foreign Affairs, he wrote:

I will not hesitate to use force, unilaterally if necessary, to protect the American people or our vital interests whenever we are attacked or imminently threatened. We must also consider using military force in circumstances beyond self-defense in order to provide for the common security that underpins global stability — to support friends, participate in stability and reconstruction operations, or confront mass atrocities.

The piece was published was seven years ago. For quite a while, Obama has been using very different language. During a press conference in Manila last week, he was asked about the criticisms of his policies. This is what he said:

My job as Commander-in-Chief is to deploy military force as a last resort, and to deploy it wisely. And, frankly, most of the foreign policy commentators that have questioned our policies would go headlong into a bunch of military adventures that the American people had no interest in participating in and would not advance our core security interests.…

Many who were proponents of what I consider to be a disastrous decision to go into Iraq haven’t really learned the lesson of the last decade, and they keep on just playing the same note over and over again. Why? I don’t know. But my job as Commander-in-Chief is to look at what is it that is going to advance our security interests over the long term, to keep our military in reserve for where we absolutely need it. There are going to be times where there are disasters and difficulties and challenges all around the world, and not all of those are going to be immediately solvable by us.

That sounds more like Brent Scowcroft than Tony Blair. It also sounds like the authentic voice of a nation still scorched by the disaster that was Iraq. According to a YouGov poll carried out last month, just fourteen per cent of Americans believe that the United States has “any responsibility” to get involved in Ukraine. And according to a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, almost half of Americans believe that the United States should take a less active role in international affairs.

Some non-Americans, such as the editors of The Economist, may be tempted to regard what is happening in U.S. foreign policy as a retreat into American isolationism. That would be taking the analysis too far. It’s an inevitable consequence of the Iraq War and its aftermath, and the economic problems that the United States has been facing. Even today, though, the United States maintains a big military presence on four continents, and its diplomatic emissaries are involved in everything from drawing up international banking regulations to trying to locate missing Nigerian schoolgirls.

Where Obama sees vital U.S. interests at stake, such as in the progress of the Iranian nuclear program or the need to reassure Asian allies about the rise of China, he is willing to go out on a limb and show assertiveness. Even in the case of Ukraine, which is not an overriding U.S. concern, he has played the key role in bringing the Europeans together to support sanctions. For the most part, however, he follows the admonitions of his electors and keeps his eyes focussed on the home front. To the rest of the world, that’s sometimes frustrating. But compared to the actions of his predecessor, it’s a small fault.